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Sparks

American Fuel Economy Just Hit a Record, Thanks to EVs and Hybrids

The EPA’s numbers show the biggest improvements in almost a decade, despite America’s thirst for ever-larger trucks and SUVs.

Electric cars.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out with its annual Automotive Trends Report for 2022 model-year vehicles, and the numbers are some of the best it’s seen. Average emissions are at a record low and fuel economy is at a record high — and according to preliminary 2023-model-year data, those trends will continue into the new year.

Overall, the EPA says average real-world CO2 emissions for new vehicles sold in 2022 dropped by 10 grams of carbon dioxide per mile for an average of 337 g/mile, the lowest the agency has recorded. On the other side, fuel economy averages are at 26 miles per gallon, an improvement of 0.6 MPG and another record high for new vehicles sold.

Of the five categories of vehicles tested, four are the most fuel efficient the agency has seen since its inception, with crossovers (what the EPA classifies as “car SUVs”) showing the biggest drop in emissions at 27 g/mile, followed by pickup trucks, sedans/wagons, minivans, and SUVs.

The not-so-good-news is the EPA also recorded its highest number of SUVs, pickups, and minivans/vans sold since 1975, accounting for a whopping 63% of new vehicles that rolled off dealer lots. And across the board, 2022 vehicles were also the heaviest and largest ever sold.

This is primarily due to two things: First, automaker safety is at an all-time high, swelling cars with better crumple zones, dozens of airbags, and scads of active safety systems. Second, Americans just like big vehicles with more power — what the EPA calls “market trends.” That likely won’t change with 2023’s numbers.

Thankfully, there will be more EVs and hybrids coming to market, which should help to offset some of the emissions. Electrics helped reduce average emissions by 22 g/mile in 2022 and increased overall fuel economy by 1.2%, and projections for the next report show an even bigger boost to 26.9 MPG in 2023.

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Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

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